I. The Body as Whale
When I was nine years old, my mother grabbed a fistful of my belly in the dressing room of a Saks Fifth Avenue and hissed, “This—this isn’t you.” As if my body had been hijacked. Apparently, the softness of my own flesh was not just undesirable but a betrayal of her parenting. My mother was both the product and the perpetrator of a cultural whale hunt: trained to starve, measure, and shrink, she passed down a theology of disappearance. I was to be thinner, better. Oh, and heterosexual. I was not to be Other. Nor hungry. And God forbid, not fat.
Even in the 1980s, Victorian anxieties about corpulence, consumption, and moral virtue persisted. Fatness became the crime, and queerness, my shameful secret its weight concealed. The whale of my body was too much to carry, and so I spent decades chasing its shadow with calorie trackers and two-a-day workouts. I lived in Ahab’s mindset: kill the thing before it kills you. I feared that desire—bodily, lesbian, uncontained—would doom me. The idea that my mother would hold starvation contests with ten-year-old me, rife with weigh-ins and bragging rights, still gives me pause. But what most stops me in my tracks à la Ishmael spying the “bitter blanks” on the Whalemen’s Chapel walls is that she would hand me a yellow hi-liter and instruct me to mark off where I would cut my thighs to make them a more acceptable size.
I doubt this experience is mine alone. Sadly, I bet thousands of young girls either imagined or engaged in marking their bodies, like blankets of whale blubber, for dismemberment.
What those yellow lines taught me, long before I had language for it, was deeper than shame. I learned to see my body as divisible, as encouraged if not required to fracture itself into smaller, more palatable bite-sized sections. To mark a body, like a whaling chart, is to rehearse the pursuit and harvest. Years later, as a voracious reader, happiest with my nose in a book and a hi-liter in my hand, I marked not flesh but sentences—turning toward voices that refused diminishment. In the lush abundance of Zora Neale Hurston, the defiant sensuality of Jeanette Winterson, and the aching beauty of Christina Rossetti, I found a counter-education: language capacious enough to hold excess, desire, and devotion without apology. Where diet culture taught me to reduce, literature taught me to increase.
When I read Moby-Dick the first time in an American lit survey course at Miami University, I recognized myself. Not as Ishmael, not even as Ahab, but as the whale: a monstrous body floating in the waters of objectification and chased by societal rage. I was unsettled by the singular focus on the whale’s body; the obsession with its size, its blubber, its ubiquity, unknowability, and inevitability were familiar. Of course, then Captain Ahab, in his monomaniacal quest to destroy the white whale, was taught as a symbol of obsession, masculine pride, or cosmic defiance. But reading and teaching it now—as a middle-aged, newly divorced and finally out lesbian mother of daughters, teacher at an all-girls school, and survivor of decades of disordered eating—I see Ahab as something else entirely: a stand-in for a culture that has been hunting, stripping, and profiting off fat bodies, especially those coded as female, for generations.
II. The Whale as Metaphor: Blubber, Capital, and the Fat Body
Melville’s sperm whale is not the villain. It is merely a body rendered grotesque by the projections of men. It is hunted not because it is evil, but because it is vast, fat, and profitable. The blubber of the whale was, like the bodies of fat women then and today, both feared and fetishized, consumed and reviled. Melville’s detailed descriptions of the whale’s anatomy, particularly in the cetology chapters, parallel the ways contemporary culture dissects fatness: cataloguing, quantifying, and pathologizing.
Such anatomical fixation is never benign. The whale’s fate is sealed not in the harpoon but in the gaze that precedes it, the belief that something so large must be broken down, refined, and made productive. Fat bodies, similarly, are not merely judged; they are processed. And Melville does not let us look away from what that processing requires. Reading Melville taught me that violence lies not only in the kill itself, but also in the systems that make destruction feel necessary.
Look no further than Chapter 96, “The Try-Works,” Melville describes the process of rendering blubber into oil, a labor-intensive act of destruction. The scene is violent, smelly, and visceral. I see this scene now as a metaphor for the ‘wellness industry,’ which sells us the illusion of health while stoking self-hatred. Ozempic, in particular, a diabetes medication now glamorized for weight loss, is the new try-works: a chemical means of distillation.[i] The promise is thinness. The cost is your body.
As Aubrey Gordon writes in You Just Need to Lose Weight (and 19 Other Myths About Fat People): “We are not a problem to be solved. We are not a crisis. We are people.”[ii] Gordon’s work, along with the fabulous Michael Hobbes on their podcast Maintenance Phase, exposes the diet industry as a bloated empire built on moral panic and pseudoscience.[iii] Fat is not the enemy. But in our culture, it must be subdued, extracted, and of course sold. Their podcast has saved me in numerous ways these past years. Each morning, driving to my job at a small high school in the deep South, I listened to Maintenance Phase as a kind of recalibration, bathed in searing wit, evidence-based arguments, and an all-around refusal to play nice with bad ideas. At a moment when my life felt most precarious—when long-held structures were beginning to show their cracks—the podcast offered something steadier than hope: the relief of finding voices brave and smart enough to name the fatphobic systems that had engineered my formative years. In their clear-eyed dismantling of diet culture’s myths, I heard not just critique but companionship, a reminder that I was not alone in resisting the stories I had been taught to live by.
One of the most devastating episodes was their takedown of The Whale, a film marketed as empathetic but steeped in fatphobia.[iv] Gordon and Hobbes eviscerate its hollow claims to compassion, showing instead how the film weaponizes fatness into both spectacle and punishment. Brendan Fraser’s performance is praised not for humanizing the character, but for donning the burdensome prosthetics of a body meant to horrify and provoke pity. In that sense, The Whale becomes a cinematic cousin to Moby-Dick—not because it honors the grandeur of the body, but because it renders it monstrous, something to be stared at, pitied, harpooned, or ultimately destroyed.
This echoes something deep in the cultural unconscious. In the 1980s, when I was growing up, girls like me were taunted on the playground or in gym class by being called whales for taking up too much space. To be a whale was to be disqualified from desirability, erased from the myth of the perfect American girl. Looking back now, I see how the image of the whale was always tied to fear of female unruliness, female appetite, and even female resistance. In Melville’s novel, the white whale is not just a creature but a symbol of something that cannot be controlled or tamed. And that is precisely what terrifies Ahab, and what terrifies our culture about women who refuse to shrink.
Gordon’s voice, sharp and unapologetic, helps reframe the fat body not as a site of shame but of survival. Her work reminds me that the real whales are not monstrous but rather magnificent. The true monstrosity lies in the ships that sail out to destroy what they refuse to understand.
One of my personal heroes, Roxane Gay, echoes this sentiment in Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, writing: “This is what most girls are taught—that we should be slender and small. That we should not take up space. I refused to shrink.”[v] Gay’s defiant insistence on the fat body as a site of both trauma and reclamation mirrors the whale’s resistance. The body becomes a terrain of conflict, and surviving it becomes its own form of rebellion. Just as Gay refuses to make herself small, the legendary sperm whale Mocha Dick, believed to have inspired Melville’s Moby-Dick, rose violently and repeatedly against the men determined to conquer him in the Pacific Ocean. The real-life wreck of the whaleship Essex, rammed by a massive bull sperm whale, is a historical testament to the refusal of a hunted creature to quietly yield its body to a system of extraction and dominance. In both stories, the whale’s and Gay’s, the body is not a passive object but an agent of disruption. Gay, in her writing and public life, embodies the same mythic force as Moby Dick: immense, scarred, unignorable, and unwilling to be fucked with.
At the all-girls high school where I teach, I watch bright, questioning minds shrink into themselves by sophomore year. Their vocabularies grow, their confidence with literary analysis improves, but their lunches become sparser, their sweatshirts baggier. We are a religious school, with rules about modesty and abstinence, but the real unspoken message these girls hear from their insulated-married-by-twenty community is this: be small. Be good. Be light enough to lift from the chuppa into motherhood. Anything else is taboo.
Associate professor of English at UC Berkeley and author of Melville’s Anatomies, Samuel Otter argues that Moby-Dick “is deeply engaged with the challenge of representing the body.”[vii] But which bodies? What does it mean that Melville’s most vivid prose is reserved for the carving, cataloguing, and consuming of a whale’s body? Ishmael’s cetology is meticulous and reverent; he adores the whale even as it is reduced to oil. In the same way, society claims to celebrate all bodies, even as it markets the tools of our erasure.
The whale’s immense bodily fat also operates as a complex symbol at the intersection of sustenance and taboo, evoking both nourishment and cultural anxieties surrounding corporeal excess. Associate professor of English at St. Mary’s University, Benjamin Doty offers a digestion-centered critique of the novel, illuminating how Melville’s narrative dwells on the visceral processes of consumption and embodiment, framing the whale’s blubber as both a vital resource and a grotesque, almost monstrous, mass to be conquered.[viii] From a fat studies perspective, this ambivalence mirrors broader societal attitudes toward fatness as simultaneously necessary and abject because fat bodies are sites of life-giving energy while also social stigma and control. The whale’s fat thus becomes a metaphor for the contested boundaries between survival and revulsion, a corporeal frontier where consumption embodies conquest, and where the visceral realities of bodily excess disrupt cultural attempts to regulate and moralize the body. Through this lens, Melville’s portrayal resonates with ongoing struggles over fatness as a material and symbolic terrain marked by desire, fear, and the politics of embodiment.
III. Ahab’s Obsession and the Queering of the Whale
Ahab’s rage is about more than a lost leg. It is about his loss of control. In Chapter 41[ix], Ishmael reports that “all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.” Ahab’s rage comes not only from the physical wound but also from a kind of emasculation, a phallic loss that intensifies his sense of impotence in the face of nature’s indifference. Moby Dick embodies brute resistance, a self-contained existence that defies submission or control much as the fat female body, simply by occupying space and asserting its presence, disrupts the patriarchal order that depends on women to accommodate the male gaze. Both provoke a rage rooted in threatened authority, in the terror of bodies that refuse to perform for or yield to male desire.
Growing up, my queerness was tied to my fatness in invisible ways. I feared desire because I feared my body. I punished myself for hungering because I had been taught that wanting—food, girls, joy—made me grotesque. I jogged miles I didn’t enjoy, fasted until I nearly fainted, looked in the mirror and prayed not to be gay. My shame was a harpoon, forged by a culture that makes the body a battleground and calls the fight self-care. Like Ishmael’s declaration that “meditation and water are wedded for ever,” I now see that the body and queer desire, that fat-shaming and homophobia, are inextricably linked. I never connected my own buried queerness to Melville’s subtle exploration of it. Indeed, he gives us a strange kind of intimacy between men: Ishmael and Queequeg sharing a bed, the sensual, almost erotic descriptions of the whale’s skin. Queer undertones pulse beneath the surface of this maritime epic. Yet even there, fear of the body’s excesses, and its pleasures, looms.
IV. Jonah, Judgment, and the Myth of Redemption
In Chapter 9, Father Mapple preaches the sermon of Jonah, the man swallowed by a whale for his disobedience. Jonah’s salvation comes only after he is vomited out: chastened, cleansed. In this telling, the whale is a container of punishment, a womb of shame. I, too, have lived inside that metaphorical belly.
When I tried to come out in college, my mother said, “But you’re already struggling with your weight. Don’t add something else.” As if being gay were another disease. I returned to the belly then, back to diet pills and the stairmaster or its evil twin, the step aerobics class, hiding myself in repentance.
I have hated my own body in academic libraries and lesbian bars and therapy offices. I have run on treadmills while praying to be different. I’ve called it discipline. I’ve called it health. But it was dismemberment. I was taught to be both whale and harpooner: to hunt myself. Aubrey Gordon, again in her podcast Maintenance Phase, dissects the language of wellness with scalpel precision. She reminds us that diet culture is not science; it’s folklore wrapped in lab coats. It’s Ahab convincing the crew that the whale is evil incarnate followed by a hot chug of grog from the makeshift chalices of inverted harpoons.
When I taught Mapple’s sermon on Jonah last semester, I asked my students why the whale is cast as punishment instead of sanctuary. Jonah is swallowed, yes, but also saved. One student, a bold feminist, said: “Maybe the whale is the only thing big enough to hold him while he figures himself out.” I cried later in the faculty restroom. For my fat body that had once been that whale, for myself, for my daughters, for the lovers I kept at arm’s length. A soft, enormous shelter that I regularly starved or punished with food. I remember that Jonah is not destroyed by the whale but changed by it.
I am done harpooning myself. I’ve already paid the price—leaving college to enter outpatient eating disorder counseling, spending a semester relearning how to live inside a body I’d spent years trying to chase into perfection. In 2010, my heart literally broke: a SCAD artery tear, a heart attack, all from years of purging and self-erasure. I’ve walked through fire to come out whole. And now, I’ve stepped out of the long shadow of compulsory heterosexuality. That “ungraspable phantom of life” Melville wrote about? It no longer haunts me. I am grasping what’s mine—desire, autonomy, fullbodied joy.
My daughters see this. They know they are loved as their true selves, their full identities, not versions shaped by patriarchy or prettiness or performance. I am trying to teach them a new gospel: that you can be big and good, wild and worthy, hungry and holy. That we do not owe the world our slenderness. That no other’s desire is more important than our flesh. Because the rendering fire of society’s try-works, the giant pots used on whalers to melt whale blubber, is not destiny. Our bodies are not beasts to be chased into oblivion, but oceans to be cherished, teeming with life, capable of surviving shipwreck with glorious shimmer.
Melville may not have written Moby-Dick as a parable of fatphobia, but his language betrays the American obsession with bodies too large to understand. I’m no longer surprised that I teach this book as often as my schedule permits and have only now begun to see the whale in myself. My students are still swimming through a world that tells them to vanish. But maybe I can be the voice that says: stay. Surface. Spout joy. Turn your leviathan body toward the sun.
V. Cetology and the Illusion of Knowing the Body
Melville devotes entire chapters to whale taxonomy, naming and organizing what cannot be fully known. Ishmael admits the futility of this pursuit, yet he persists. Like the BMI chart, these efforts give the illusion of mastery.[x] But bodies are not species to be classified. Fat people are not failures to be corrected.
Scholars such as Otter have noted that Melville’s obsession with cataloging the whale reflects his deeper anxiety about meaning itself. The inability to pin down the whale becomes symbolic of the inability to dominate what is fluid, immense, and unknowable. Similarly, the body—especially the fat, female, queer body—eludes simplistic interpretations.
As Gordon points out, fatness is not a temporary state on the way to thinness. It is a mode of existence. To live in a fat body is to be scrutinized, legislated, rendered public. To live in a fat queer body is to be told, daily, that you are both too much and not enough.
Contemporary fat-studies scholarship provides critical frameworks for understanding fatphobia not merely as individual bias but as a systemic, gendered form of violence that shapes bodily autonomy and social belonging. Shawna Felkins, professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, emphasizes how fat stigma is deeply entwined with capitalist and patriarchal norms, producing a moral economy in which fat bodies are disciplined as sites of failure and deviance.[xi] Similarly, recent research on fatphobia as gender-based violence highlights how fat women are subjected to both symbolic exclusion and physical policing in public spaces, reflecting broader structures of control that limit access to safety and agency. These insights build upon foundational feminist critiques by scholars like Susan Bordo, who traces the historical construction of fatness as a marker of moral and aesthetic deficiency, especially for women.[xii] Together, these perspectives foreground fatphobia as a complex cultural system that enforces normative body standards through surveillance, shaming, and social marginalization, making it a crucial lens for interpreting representations of bodily excess and containment.
VI. The Legacy: My Daughters and the Breaking of the Hunt
I now see that by portraying whale fat as both life-sustaining resource and monstrous mass, Melville taps into a cultural unease about controlling nature and the body, reflecting the contradictions of a society obsessed with productivity and purity yet haunted by the visceral realities of consumption and decay. Thus, the whale’s fat body becomes a potent symbol for the fraught dynamics of survival, power, and abjection that continue to resonate in contemporary discourses on embodiment and fatphobia.
I have daughters now—one 23, one 17—navigating a world flooded with GLP-1 ads and Love Island highlights, where body positivity battles a relentless tide of diet culture. Their bodies are still growing, but their hunger for nourishment and self-acceptance is vast. I watch them scroll through endless images and challenges, sometimes doubting themselves despite the love and confidence I try to teach them. Yet when they eat with joy, run without shame, and take up space without apology, I see resistance. In a culture that tries to harpoon their self-worth, I refuse to pass down that weapon.
Girls of the 1980s like me were raised on Jane Fonda jazzercise tapes, SnackWell’s cookies, and the message that we should smile more, eat less, and always aspire to be desirable to men. The media was a slick mirror that reflected only one type of body—a thin one. Even cartoons and teen magazines policed our thighs. Today’s girls are far from free; they’re navigating TikTok weight-loss influencers, Snapchat filters, and the continued monetization of their insecurities. But I see cracks forming. I see the whale surfacing.
The irony is not lost on me. I read Moby-Dick as an undergraduate, returned to it in graduate school, and have spent over two decades teaching it, blindly tracing Melville’s metaphors, analyzing Ahab’s madness, marveling at Ishmael’s yearning. I taught students to interpret the whale’s fat as both commodity and grotesquerie, a symbol of excess and desire. But I never once connected it to my own body. All that time, I was living inside the very obsession I so eloquently taught against, shrinking myself, purging in secret, fearing my own bigness. I missed the most intimate interpretation: that I, too, had swallowed the harpoon. That I had been taught to fear fat not just on the page but on my frame. Only through years of healing did I begin to see how those same destructive narratives lived in me, and how they threatened to pass through me to my daughters.
But now I know better. Now I read the text differently. I live differently. I do not say to them in a department store mirror, “This isn’t you.” I say, This is you, and you are enough. I tell them a whale is not a monster. A whale is power. Be a whale!
VII. Epilogue: Rising From the Deep
In the end, Ahab’s obsession destroys him. The whale survives. The blubber remains. The sea does not give up its secrets, and the body does not yield to conquest. For years, I too lived under the tyranny of my mother’s inherited obsession. She was raised on the same gospel of thinness, taught to measure her worth by the scale, to flinch at her reflection, to eat quietly and never too much. She even refused to let my father see her without a full face of make-up. I used to carry anger toward her, but I see now what she had been forced to swallow. Her mother, my grandmother, lived under those same cruel rules, dictated by patriarchal beauty standards that shaped entire generations of women into silhouettes. How could they have known it was the harpoon they’d been handed? The same bloodthirsty logic Melville etched into Ahab’s pursuit, an unrelenting desire to dominate what should never have been conquered, was at work in the way women were taught to discipline their bodies.
But like Ishmael, I have become the survivor outside the charybdis. I have floated, battered but alive, on the wreckage of that history. And in doing so, I’ve come to understand my mother with new tenderness. I have forgiven her. We are rebuilding something honest, unmarred by shame. Let this be a new gospel: the whale is not to be trifled with.
[i] FDA Briefing Document: Semaglutide (Ozempic) for Chronic Weight Management, 2023.
[ii] Gordon, Aubrey. You Just Need to Lose Weight (and 19 Other Myths About Fat People). Beacon Press, 2023.
[iii] Gordon, Aubrey, and Michael Hobbes. Maintenance Phase. Podcast. Accessed 2025.
[iv] The Whale, directed by Darren Aronofsky, performances by Brendan Fraser, Hong Chau, and Sadie Sink, A24, 2022.
[v] Gay, Roxane. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. HarperCollins, 2017.
[vi] Kardashian SKIMS Face Wrap, 2024 marketing campaign.
[vii] Otter, Samuel. Melville’s Anatomies. University of California Press, 1999.
[viii] Doty, Benjamin. “Digesting Moby-Dick,” Leviathan 19, no. 2 (2017): 123–145.
[ix] Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. 1851.
[x] CDC Adult BMI Calculator. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Accessed 2025.
[xi] Felkins, Shawna “The Weight I Carry: Fatphobia, Gender, and Capitalism,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 40, no. 2 (2019): 55–75.[xii] Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
